New sgminer 5.0 beta with Unified Runtime-Kernel-Switching Now Available

3Jun 2014

There is now a new sgminer 5.0 beta (source) available that is trying to provide an unified and feature-full GPU miner by integrating the kernels from the sph-sgminer, the SHA3 (keccak) from cgminer as well as the modified x11 and x13 kernels from lasybear’s fork of sgminer. The most important feature, apart form the wider crypto algorithms support in the new version is the support for runtime-kernel-switching on the fly. Simply said you are able to have multiple pools set in your config and these pools can be for different algorithm coins and with different GPU settings for each. So a single GPU mining rig can mine for different coins using different algorithms, or have these pools as failover etc. No need to use a different miner for different pools and for different coins anymore, or at least almost as not yet all algorithms are supported.

Currently the new sgminer 5.0 beta does have support for the following kernels: Scrypt, Scrypt-N, X11 (darkcoin-mod), X13 (marucoin-mod), SHA3-Keccak (maxcoin), animecoin, fuguecoin, groestlcoin, inkcoin, myriadcoin-groestl, quarkcoin, qubitcoin, sifcoin and twecoin. Do note that sgminer is still an OpenCL miner suitable for mining on AMD-based GPUs, for Nvidia CUDA support you will still have to rely on either CudaMiner or ccMiner, depending on the algorithm of the coin you are mining if it is supported. You can also run Nvidia GPUs with OpenCL on the sgminer, however the performance you will get this way will simply not be worth it as compared to what a dedicated CUDA-based miner might offer. The pool specific settings you can currently set on per pool basis in the sgminer.conf file are the following: pool-algorithm, pool-nfactor, pool-intensity, pool-xintensity, pool-rawintensity, pool-gpu-engine, pool-gpu-memclock, pool-gpu-threads, pool-thread-concurrency, pool-gpu-fan.

We have compiled a windows binary for the new sgminer 5.0 beta and you can download and try it yourself. Do note however that this is a beta software and still needs some more work in order to work stable and without problems. While we were testing it we had the miner crashing multiple times while building the binary of the OpenCL kernel, we have noticed that if you have more than 3 pools setup in the config it happens all the time, with 3 or less it builds the kernels just fine and after that it seem to work stable with more pools added. This happens regardless if the pools are using the same algorithm or are configured to use different algorithms, so good for testing, but do not be in a hurry to replace all of your other miners just yet.

Matt, it depends on the coin you are willing to mine and the algorithm it uses. You can find all of the kernels supported in the kernel folder, just type the name of the file without the .cl in the end in the pool settings using the “pool-algorithm” parameter in the config file to load it. More information is also available in the doc folder in the archive with the miner, also see the example config file included. No need to set a general kernel option anymore like you had to do with older miners, now you set it separately for each pool you have configured, so that you can have pools using different algorithms.

I just added some fixes for a problem which might have been causing your crashing (but Windows binaries are not yet available, I think). If you are having problems, it always helps if you can run sgminer with “sgminer.exe -c yourconfig.conf -T -v” (the “-T -v” is what I mean). Then when you have a crash show us a screenshot of the sgminer window. You can give a link to it and short description here and we will take a look: https://github.com/sgminer-dev/sgminer/issues/new

When I switch algo’s via pool switching, in this instance from X11 to X13, I get all rejected shares for X13 (Low diff), then the pool disconnects after about 15 seconds. Auto switching to Scrypt-N thereafter causes it to ‘soft’ hang. The console is still responsive, but no shares are submitted, and the hash rate never changes. I’ve yet to see it actually successfully switch an algo without restarting. This is using the binary package provided by admin.

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